


Perfect Clarity

by Jazoriah



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Zombies Run! Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-22 21:11:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13175289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jazoriah/pseuds/Jazoriah
Summary: Archie sees things.





	Perfect Clarity

She sees things.

It’s not that she’s a psychic, or particularly clever. It’s just that she can look at a pattern and pick out the building blocks. The world is full of wonderful shapes, colours overlapping, angles and criss-crosses and connections, and she delves into it like a deep-sea diver. When you surrender to it, there is beauty in tiny things. The waves and specks and hurricanes that make up a universe that will swallow you, and perhaps that is a good thing. Perhaps it is the best way to understand.

She sees things.

Archie Jensen has always been a little out of step. She entered university, and giggled during lectures. She graduated, and frowned at the ceremony. She threw herself into research, and realised that with every step forward the universe opened up in front of her with a thousand more questions, millions of potential supernovae inviting her forward with their blazing spectra, perhaps directing and guiding, perhaps blinding. It would be so easy to get lost.

She sees things.

But one thing she never saw, one thing that blindsided her with the intensity of a bulldozer on steroids, was the rippling hellscape that followed the outbreak of the zombie virus.

It was everywhere. It came from every side, from every safe avenue. All the places she might have called home disintegrated in a single screaming night. Her house was overrun, her friends were scattered to the wind if they were even still alive, and her family… she tries not to think too hard about her family.

When the ashes start to settle, when the blood has dried to the floor, Archie takes a long moment, and thinks about what she sees.

There are children dragged from vacant, ravenous parents. There are cities systematically disintegrated from within. There are people that break, piece by piece, until the only things left are survival and resentment.

She sees, and she thinks, _I can help_.

Surrounded by so much suspicion and hatred, she becomes the light. Archie Jensen embraces her silly side, stepping into funny words and cute animals. She jokes, and she sings, and she feels the clinging, grasping, clawing slime of the world. It sits at the edges of her vision, and reaches. It stretches. It envelopes.

Archie sees, and when the darkness covers it all, she looks harder.

People are threatening each other, but they do it because they have something to protect. Even when it is just themselves, on their own little farmstead, they have something that meant the world to them, when the world meant anything. There is history, and sentiment, and art. Their selfishness is not pure selfishness. It comes from a place of reverence, of love.

She cannot agree, but she sees.

Hope is bleeding from the frame around reality, and everyone is losing their grip on what made them human, what made them real. Archie feels it, can feel the tug at the corners of her eyes. She feels, and she curls, and she says,

“Enough, I think.”

She is done being another victim. She is done tearing herself apart in service of a memory that will never fill the world as it once did. She is done giving herself away to an ideal.

At New Canton there are kids that like rice pudding night on Saturdays. They throw sticks in the air and make epic stories from the shapes they fall into. They giggle at long speeches in town hall and throw stolen potatoes from the kitchen at each other while the grown-ups give lectures on how best to live up to the lives they had before. There are children that lie in newly sewn fields that tell each other stories about the dots in the sky, the shapes they make, and the stories they carve through infinity.

All things are new.

Throw aside the lens you have been given. Look at the world as something fresh, something hard, but infinitely rich. Something crisp, and colourful, and new.

Archie sees things.

The countryside is rugged and open and pocked with hungry corpses, and with pounding feet she devours it. New Canton needs care, it needs hope, so she pierces the world around it for food and clothes and something to laugh at. She is a pioneer on a string. She is a beacon.

When the settlement over the way buckles against an invading missile, she steps into the maelstrom and finds the traumatised souls scattered across the countryside. She sees their suspicion, sees the glares her own people send their way, and offers a guileless smile.

When the fireman with the _delectable_ shoulders steps in to drive away the horde at their heels, her eyes sparkle and she extends a single, glowing thread of welcome, even as he berates the children clinging to his neck. He is brave, and ferociously protective of the people he loves, and Archie _makes sure_ he sees her.

When the whining machines appear and force the zombies into order, she runs at the problem and observes until the patterns and waves and numbers coalesce into something she can understand, something she can harness. She becomes a weapon, a master, a force for the new Mother Nature.

And when the monster that has eaten away at her home, her future, her _world_ , opens his maw and gulps her into his vision of a new order, she can see where this is going. She sees that there may not be way out. Sitting in her chest is a thick line tying her to those she has collected to herself in the apocalypse –  her fireman and her Five, the doctor reaching out for her lost love, the two operators that never really get along – and she can feel that line tightening with every trembling moment. But the light is dwindling, and her energy is fading.

Archie sees things. She thinks she can see the end of things.

Van Ark is a stain on her vision, a creeping, sneering marionette of his own malice. A perfectly polite ghoul, weaving her nerves into a symphony of anguish. She looks at him, and she sees nothing. He is nothing.

The walls press in around her, the man with the jagged eyes leans into her. This place may be the last thing she ever sees.

But she knows, with every fibre of her being, that what she saw up until now was not nothing. There are people out there building a new future, there are families reaching out to each other with faith and hope, there are countless clever people pounding away at the apocalypse, attacking from every angle because they will not be beaten. They will not be defined by tragedy. The world can be better, it can always be better when people are brave and loving and ready to _make_ it better, and she has seen such ferocity in the people behind her that she _knows_ this man will not win. This tiny, vicious creature, so full of resentment and fear. A patchwork man modelling himself after a God that has long since turned away. He is nothing.

She _knows_ what matters. Knows they will be coming for her, that they will never stop fighting. Knows that hell is temporary and justice is a choice. One that they make every single day, and will continue, even if she disappears in this hole.

She is so scared, but she is not reduced.

Archie saw things. And some people, those that were very lucky, saw her.

And they would never, ever forget.

**Author's Note:**

> This was my Secret Santa for qkhilltop. I got really excited when I saw she had Archie as one of her favourite characters, and then got totally carried away with how much I love her.
> 
> Merry Christmas, to all of you. Xx


End file.
